


In theory this would be regifting

by Orangebubble



Series: Birthday of my Baby [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Bday fic for Gavi, Birthday Presents, Deviant Upgraded Connor | RK900, Fowler destroys all the fun, Gavin doesnt like paperwork, Gavin finally sees Nines, Gavin should let people talk, M/M, Nines is a sweetheart, Pre-Relationship, Soft Upgraded Connor | RK900, Sweet & Soft, Upgraded Connor | RK900 Has a Different Name, but who does? (Me), no beta we die like man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 01:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20940023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orangebubble/pseuds/Orangebubble
Summary: Gavin doesn't want to do paperwork. He finds a present while stalling and is a bit paranoid about it. Nines helps to clear things up. It's very soft.Part 2 of my Bday series for Gavin - this time softer





	In theory this would be regifting

**Author's Note:**

> Heyo, maybe again? I don't know, would blow my mind if, yes.
> 
> Well, here you have part 2. Nines is a total sweetheart and Gavin really should stop interrupting people (and do his paperwork)

Gavin didn’t really want to come back to work after his lunch break. Not really in the mood to fight himself through the mountains of paperwork, that had been ignored for a while, till Fowler had had enough and forced him to finish them.

Gavin was not made for paperwork, he was more for the action that the job as a detective brought. The investigation, the interrogation of suspects and sometimes hunting after them. But his unwillingness to do it had bitten him in the ass now and he was benched from any real work till he had finished it to a workable amount.

Letting some air out between his teeth, not really a whistle, he made his way to the break room, stalling the paperwork a little longer. To his regret, the coffee machine didn’t need any refill and was full of piping hot coffee. Still trying to take some time, he littered around the room, till he caught the eye of a very stern-looking Fowler through the glass of his office. He stopped in his tracks immediately like a child who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and made his way to his desk with a lowered head, half-drunk cup of coffee in hand.

With the most theatrically sign he could muster, Gavin let himself fall loudly in his chair so that truly anyone knows how unhappy he was with the arrangement. But no one really paid him attention, when he did look around, besides Chris, who gave him just a bemused smile. He pouted, not bemused at all and then finally turned to his desk, where still mountains of paperwork were sitting in piles.

He looked at it with so much hatred in his eyes that you wonder why it didn’t burst into flames. But nothing happened and with a quieter sign, he resigned to his fate.

However, he did that with grumbling, when he sat his cup down on his usual empty spot in all the papers and scooted closer to his desk, moving papers around to get to his keyboard. And there he found it.

Under all the reports, that whyever were still written and printed out in paper sat a small dark blue box with a lime green ribbon around it that formed a bow on the top. Not the best choice for packaging, but nevertheless somebody had placed a gift box on his desk.

Gavin looked at it suspiciously and then a little more boldly, poked the box which wasn’t bigger than his coffee cup. Something moved inside.

_What the Fu-_

“Won’t you open it?”

Gavin reared back from his desk, his head snapping back that he feared shortly for head trauma and he looked with wide eyes at the owner of the voice, completely ignoring the high pitched noise he had made.

And there stood is prime and prober new shiny android partner, well not that new had they been working together for nearly a year now, it would be one in next January, dubbed Nines. He still preferred to wear his android uniform, issued by Cyberlife, but minus all the makers as it was law now.

Nines was…. strange, to say at least. He was a carbon copy of Connor if you take away his height, built, default facial expression and eyes. Form his personality the two androids who called each other brothers, they couldn’t be farther from each other. You would describe Connor like an eager puppy, who yes could still bite - Gavin knew of that for sure- - where Nines was more like a panther, silently and dangerous in himself. Not a trace of social programming in his software which made it hard for the android at work, but it worked with Gavin as partner surprisingly well.  
They had warmed up to each other over time. Nines was okay now. Still strange but okay in Gavin's books.

“W-what?” he came back to himself, holding onto his chair to not fall.

“Won’t you open, your present Detective?”

Gavin looked back at the box, then at his android partner, then back at the box and back at its partner.

His eyes narrowed to slits in suspicion.

“How do you know it’s a present? And that’s it for me? Do you know who put it there? Is that a prank by Brown again, because I swear to god I wi-”

Nines signed, a very human gesture he had picked up, and laid a comforting hand on Gavin’s shoulder to calm him down. Yes, they both were in the touching territory but just barely and if the android made any kind of the wrong move, Gavin would take away these rights.

“Calm down Detective. Well, it sure looks like a present, doesn’t it? And as it was left on your desk I presume it was meant for you. And I kn-”

But Gavin was not finished with his suspicion. Normally when he got a present that was so nice but colorblind warped, it was by Tina or Chris, maybe Elijah if he sent him something to annoy the heck out of him, and he was given to him either in person or left on his doorstep. Never in his eight years working for the central station of the DPD had somebody left a present on his desk or gifted him anything inside these walls, beside a poorly warped secret Santa gift. So excuse him if his suspicion was high in the regard of this box. Officer Brown, after all, had started a hard prank war in the office against anybody and this was a prime spot for a prank.

Where was that fucker by the way?

“And Brown is still on his prank war and this innocent looking box is prime material for a prank. Look at the warping Nines! It’s lime green!”

“You don’t like it?” Nines sounded sad. Why does Nines sound sad?

He looked at the other, had it jumped back to the box while he had been talking. Nines looked sad, well as sad as he could look with his limited facial expressions.

“I thought you said your favorite colors were dark blue and green?”

The android would get him in trouble with Anderson if he kept sounding and looking so sad.

“No, I mean yes! I like green! But lime green? That’s not my color, you know.”

“Oh.”

Thank god he sounded less sad but still detached.

“But back to business, you saw who left it here? If it’s Brown I will throw it at his head or no better, let him pick it up himself, after all, there could be a trigger when you lift it”, he mused.

“No, Detective. I don’t I didn’t saw Brown or any other officer leaving it. It was-”

“Well, shit this doesn’t make it better!” Gavin snarled.

A hand hit the surface of his desk hard, the impact muffled by the paper that started to flutter around from it.

“Detective! Could you for one fucking second stop and give me at least the opportunity to answer your fucking questions!”

Well, hearing Nines curse was a surprise in itself, but hearing him so angry and outraged made Gavin rear back in his desk chair, looking at his partner once more with big surprised eyes.

Nines' angry face contorted back to his neutral default expression as he saw, how he had horrified the Detective and the people around him. It was silent in the precinct, even Fowler looked up from his work to them.

Embarrassed on by his behavior Nines adjusted his jacket self-consciously, but with a hard glance around he broke the silence around them and everybody got back to work as nothing had happened. To scared by his terminator eye, as Gavin called it. Fortunately, neither Connor nor Hank was here at the moment. This gesture didn’t work on both of them.  
Taking his attention back to his human partner, Nines started once more again, hopefully now uninterrupted, who still looked at him in shock.

“As I was saying, I saw no Officer, other personnel or civil person leaving the box for you. The present, the box was left by myself.” He was back to his calm and collected self.

Gavin needed a second to process the information, would he have been and android his LED would have spun in a very fast yellow.

“Y-you left me this box?” he asked unbelievingly.

“Correct.”

Nines was stared at with an open mouth by the detective, speechless, for some time. It was getting awkward and he opened his mouth to speak once more. That was not the reaction he had hoped for. But Gavin beat him to it.

“Why would you leave me a present?”

Now it was Nines' turn to look at his partner with confusion.

“It’s the 7th of October 2039.”

“And?”

“That’s your birthday if my information is correct from the DPD database.”

“Oh.”

Had his partner forgotten his own birthday? He presumed that humans forget things easily and it had been a busy week for the detective, as well as emotionally challenging with his ban from active duty. But still he had been informed by Connor, that humans valued the the day of their birth in a special way. That’s why the Lieutenant had insisted on the same sentiments on his and Connor’s activation day.

“That still doesn’t explain why you gave me a present.”

Why was his human partner always so confusing?

“As far as I know its costume to gift people things on their birthday to celebrate the day.”

“People you **like**, Nines. And I don’t even ‘celebrate the day’, besides some drinks with Tina, maybe.” Gavin insisted.

Nines looked at him like a lost puppy.

“But I **like** you, Detective.” The android completely ignored the second part of his statement.

“.... What?”

His partner never made it easy for him, did he? Well good that Nines liked that.

“Well, yes I like you. I understand that we don’t have the most amicable relationship. But I like working with you. I like that you are my partner and so I thought a present was appreciated for your birthday. After all, it’s the celebration of your birth. And because I’m happy that you are indeed my work partner, I am happy that you were born today. Or I would have never met you.”

That was the sweetest thing anybody ever had said to him, regarding him being born. His parents didn’t really care that he was alive after all and neither Tina or Chris or Elijah or any of his past romantic relationships had ever told him that they were glad he was alive. He knew that they were glad that he was there, but they never told him that with words.

Gavin was very touched and he didn’t really know how he should react. It made him feel gooey, the good kind, directly where his heart was. And that didn’t make him angry, an emotion he knew very well. He could feel color springing to his cheeks, making him blush, from his partners' words.

“If it’s inappropriate I can take it back”, Nines made motions to grab the box, but Gavin was faster.

“No! No, take backs!”

Gavin pressed the box to his chest, trying to protect him from the other. Nines looked at him confused, Gavin changed emotions so fast, but then a small smile formed itself on his lips.

“Would you open it then?”

Gavin looked shyly away from his partner, embarrassed by his own reaction. It was a completely new territory for him, feeling this way.

“Fine.” he declared grumpily.

Nines smile grew and Gavin looked away once more. Setting the present back on his place at his desk, he gently pulled at the bow to open it as no other material was used to keep it together. It came off easily and under the watchful eyes of his android partner, he lifted the lid.

Inside was a dark green stress ball old and used, but still in good condition or maybe more fixed back into a better condition. The seams that had been before broken were fixed so that the filling no longer showed.

It was his old stress ball, that Fowler had confiscated.  
“That’s my old stress ball”, Gavin declared dumbfounded.

“Correct.”

“How, did you get that? Fowler confiscated it when I threw it at you on our first day and hit him instead.”

_Oh_

“I asked Fowler for it and he gave it to me with the promise I would stop you from throwing it at people.”

Gavin pulled the ball out and turned it around in his hand, looking at the places it had been fixed.

“You fixed it.”

“Yes.”

Gavin was quiet for a moment, just looking at the stress ball. Nines took at its invitation to talk further, trying to explain his reasoning as the reaction of his partner made him feel like it had not been enough for a present.

“I noticed that you searched for it when you highly stressed for de-stressing I suppose and your mood fell further when you didn’t found it.”

“Mhmm.”

“I, I thought it would be an appropriate present, with fixing it, because you seem to like it and it’s useful and I wanted our relationship not be overshadowed with a loss of a vital object of you.”

Gavin looked up form the ball to his partner, who was not looking at him. His LED was spinning yellow.

He is nervous.

It was a strange present, to begin with, but it was also very Nines. It was oddly sweet in its way, in Nines' social awkward way. It was a present he had laid much thought into, with the way he was talking about it and it was more than Gavin could say anyone else had every did for a present to him.

It made warmth bloom again in Gavin’s chest and he smiled.

“Thank you, Nines. Really.”

He smiled up to his partner, who looked back at him. Nines was still for a second before a slight blue blush came to his cheeks.

“I’m glad you liked it.”, he looked at him shyly.

They smiled at each other softly, till they were rudely interrupted. Both flinched a little.

“I’m glad you had this heart to heart and all, but Reed your paperwork doesn’t finish itself and Nines I need the surveillance tapes fixed of the Harrison case. Both of you go back to work. You can finish your hug party after hours.” Fowler was behind Nines, his arms crossed, looking annoyed.

Both looked away embarrassed. When nothing happened and Fowler had to raise an eyebrow, Nines finally moved to his station and Gavin rolled back to his, ball and box still in hand.

“Good. And don’t forget no throwing with that thing.” With that, he turned.

A few minutes after Fowler had left, him being back in his fishbowl of office, Gavin looked up to the other side of his desk. Nines was looking at him, too. They smiled at each other, a little blush on both their cheeks.

Gavin ended the contact and gave the stress ball at the side of his keyboard a little squeeze then looked back at Nines, who was still watching him. Under his breath, he formed the words “Thank you” again and Nines smile got wider. He liked it when Nines smiled.

Maybe he should take the advice of Fowler and should give Nines a hug, after hours of course. A thoughtful gift like this deserved it at least.


End file.
